


Spiders Are A Girl's Best Friend (okay, no, that's a lie, spiders are awful)

by coriolana



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, Meet-Cute, slightly AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-29 01:49:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3877774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coriolana/pseuds/coriolana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moving into Stark Tower had its perks: the views were great, the carpet was new, and Pepper's commute to work had become very short indeed. The drawbacks of living in Stark Tower—Happy's over-protective dad act, <i>Tony knocking on her door at 3am</i> instead of calling her, the nagging suspicion that JARVIS sometimes judged her breakfast choices (every now and then a girl's gotta eat cake for breakfast, okay?)—were mostly just irritating, except this morning. This morning, she really, <i>really</i> needed Rosa, her no-nonsense next door neighbor, because there was a freaking <i>gigantic</i> spider in her bathtub.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spiders Are A Girl's Best Friend (okay, no, that's a lie, spiders are awful)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gth694e](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gth694e/gifts).



> When gth694e asks for femslash meet-cute, you write femslash meet-cute.

Moving into Stark Tower had its perks: the views were great, the carpet was new, and Pepper's commute to work had become _very_ short indeed. The drawbacks of living in Stark Tower—Happy's over-protective dad act, Tony _knocking on her door_ at 3am instead of calling her, the nagging suspicion that JARVIS sometimes judged her breakfast choices (every now and then a girl's gotta eat cake for breakfast, okay?)—were mostly just irritating, except this morning. This morning, she really, _really_ needed Rosa, her no-nonsense next door neighbor, because there was a freaking _gigantic_ spider in her bathtub.

Pepper clutched the oversized, ultra-plush bathrobe "Tony" had bought for her birthday two years ago and steeled herself, then turned her back to the spider and leapt out of the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.

"Is there something wrong, Miss Potts?" JARVIS asked. Pepper folded her arms across her stomach and backed across her bedroom, eyes on the bathroom door. There was a spider-scale _Arc de Triomphe_ of a gap between the bottom of the door and the floor. How fast did spiders move? She retreated into her apartment's tiny living/dining room and shut the bedroom door behind her.

"Miss Potts?"

For a second, she considered lying to the AI. She put her face in her hand. In all her years of working for Tony Stark, lying to the man's AI about finding a spider in her bathtub wouldn't be her most embarrassing low, but it would make the top ten. Bottom ten?

"There's a spider in my bathroom, JARVIS. A really big one. It startled me."

"Shall I call building maintenance, Miss Potts?"

Pepper's cheeks went red-hot, and she knew that she had turned the shade of pink that Tony found hilarious and that she hated with the fire of a thousand suns.

"No, I—I'll take care of it," she said. She squared her shoulders and looked at the closed bedroom door. She'd feel better about facing down the spider if she had actual clothes on. But clothing required going into the bedroom, where the spider could, at this very minute, be waiting for her, poised to spring as soon as she opened the door—or worse, took off the bathrobe.

Tony wouldn't notice if she moved to another apartment and hired movers to transport all her stuff, Pepper thought. Except what if the movers didn't notice the spider and it got into her clothes and _came with her—_

"PEPPER," Tony bellowed. Despite JARVIS's excellent background noise-filtering algorithms, she heard a smoke alarm, Dummy's frantic beeping, and the whoosh of a fire extinguisher. "JARVIS says you have a spider problem. Want me to come up and take care of it? I'm calibrating the repulsors on the suit—"

Pepper had mostly trained herself out of the habit of looking at the speakers in the ceiling when JARVIS or Tony used the intercoms (she thought it made her look like a confused puppy), but this time, she glared at the nearest speaker, mouthed the word _tattletale_ , and cut Tony off. "It's fine, Tony! I've got it! And I'm not ready to remodel this bathroom yet," she added under her breath.

"Call me when you change your mind—Dummy, NO—"

Pepper closed her eyes as the intercom cut out in the middle of Tony's yelp, then immediately opened them, because _there was a spider in her apartment._ She looked at the bottom of her bedroom door and shuffled back a few feet. Her toes were getting cold on the slate floor.

"Miss Potts, if I may make a suggestion?"

Pepper checked the digital clock on the microwave in her mostly unused open-plan kitchen. She was going to be late if she let this nonsense go on. "Go ahead, JARVIS," she said, and sighed. For the first time, she regretted that JARVIS had no sensors in her bedroom—she could have asked it to scan for the spider, then she could have grabbed some clothes and had a selection of her favorite cosmetics couriered over before her first meeting of the day.

"Miss Rushman from the legal department is performing an errand which will take her past your apartment in approximately one point one minutes. She has no arachnophobia noted in her Stark Industries psychological profile—"

_When I am fully clothed and there are no spiders anywhere near me, I will feel guilty about this. And then I will authorize a ridiculous bonus for Miss Rushman_ , Pepper thought, then spun on her heel and marched to her front door. She counted to ten, then yanked open the door and stuck her head out.

The hall was empty. Pepper's heart fluttered. _The spider could have gotten out of the bedroom when she wasn't watching. It could be RIGHT BEHIND HER._ She hopped over the threshold into the hall and felt a brief flash of despair that disappeared with the sound of opening elevator doors, followed by the brisk clicking of a set of heels. Pepper checked that her robe was closed all the way, straightened, and made sure she was smiling as Natalie Rushman rounded the corner.

To her credit, Rushman barely flinched at the sight of Tony Stark's personal assistant standing barefoot in a bathrobe in the middle of the hall. "Miss Potts," she said. "Can I help you?"

Pepper felt her smile wavering and forced it to widen. "It's Miss Rushman, isn't it?" she said. The younger woman nodded warily. "Miss Rushman, how do you feel about spiders?"

Her face went blank. "I don't have any particular feelings about spiders," she said. Pepper had the impression she was choosing her words carefully. "Is there a reason my feelings about spiders are important?"

God, she was going to kill Tony for this. Pepper didn't know how this was Tony's fault, but somehow _it was_. Wait—no, she knew exactly how it was Tony's fault: he'd taken her away from Rosa, her designated spider-squisher. Pepper took a deep breath and shored up her failing smile.

"This is really embarrassing, but I—have a spider in my bathroom? And I really don't like spiders? At all?"

 Rushman's lips flattened slightly as if she was holding in a laugh. Her lipstick was a perfect matte red for her coloring, Pepper realized. "I think I can help," Rushman said. "It's in your bathroom?"

_Oh, thank God_ , Pepper thought and sighed, then gestured to her door. "Yes, right through there. It's the master bath. I closed the door because—" She cut herself off and felt her cheeks heating. Rushman actually smiled at that, a lopsided little smirk that might have been mean if her eyes weren't sparkling with humor.

"Because the more closed doors between you and a spider, the better?" she said dryly. Pepper thought she might combust from embarrassment.

"Yes," she admitted. Rushman's smile widened for a split second before she turned to push open the apartment door. Her tailored skirt made the most of a trim waist and generous ass, while athletic calves tapered to red-soled Jimmy Choos. Pepper realized she was checking the other woman out and jerked her gaze up to Rushman's shoulders—which were broad and muscled like a swimmer's.

It figured that the person Pepper would turn to in order to be rescued from a spider would tick every one of her boxes when it came to physical attractiveness.

Rushman paused just inside the front door and zeroed in on the bedroom with a single glance, then walked to it without hesitating.

"It could be in the bedroom!" Pepper blurted from the doorway. Rushman looked over her shoulder at Pepper, one eyebrow raised. Pepper measured a gap with her fingers. "There's a—the bathroom door doesn't quite meet the floor at the bottom. It could be in there."

Rushman's nose twitched. "I'll be careful," she said, and opened the door. Pepper winced, because what she _meant_ was that the spider could get out when she opened the door, but she wasn't about to clarify that particular mortifying detail. Rushman advanced into the bedroom and Pepper felt a sudden, paranoid certainty that she'd left dirty panties on the floor or a vibrator in the bed. After a moment in which Rushman didn't cry out in disgust, Pepper heard the bathroom door open. She fixed her gaze on the bottom of the doorway into her bedroom, then realized that there was no reason the spider had to stick to the floor—it could crawl along the ceiling just as easily. Her gaze flew to the ceiling and she hunched her shoulders, her skin crawling with the certainty that the spider was about to drop onto her head.

"Found it!" Rushman called. "What a cute little baby," she crooned.

_Baby???_

"Do you have a plastic container you don't mind parting with? Something with a lid?" Rushman called.

Pepper dug through her recycling until she found a salad bowl with a snap-on lid, then carried it into the bedroom. She found Rushman in the bathroom and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw that the spider was _on. Rushman's. Hand._

"Thanks," the other woman said, then took the bowl, popped the lid off one-handed, and bumped her finger against the edge. "Go on, baby," she cooed. "I'm gonna take you somewhere you won't scare nice ladies in bathrobes."

The spider crawled obediently into the bowl, and Rushman snapped the lid into place. She tucked the bowl under her arm as casually as if it was a file folder and not _a takeout bowl with a spider in it._ "Will that be all, Miss Potts?" she asked politely.

"How did you _do_ that?" Pepper asked. Rushman's little smile came back. It was the kind of smile someone could get addicted to seeing.

"Some people call me the Black Widow," she said. Pepper made a face of sympathy and steeled herself, then took a calculated risk.

"Men can be so cruel when relationships end," she said. Rushman's smile turned sly.

"They weren't all men," she replied. "If that will be all . . . ?"

Rushman shifted her weight, and Pepper realized that she was blocking the door of the bathroom. She stepped out of the way quickly. "Thank you, Miss Rushman," she said. "You've gone above and beyond today."

Rushman bent her head slightly. "It was my pleasure, Miss Potts," she said, and swept out of the bathroom only to pause at the threshold of the bedroom. "And please—call me Natalie."

Pepper's heart skipped a beat. "Pepper," she said. Natalie shifted her weight as if she was leaving, then turned back.

"My number's 212-555-0184. You know, if you have spider problems again. Or even if you don't have spider problems."

Pepper's heart did several happy skips. "Good to know," she made herself say coolly. Natalie smiled her sly, crooked smile again, then disappeared through the door. A second later, the front door shut.

Pepper hugged herself for a second before turning to her newly spider-free bathroom. "JARVIS," she said. "Make a reservation for two at La Bernardin for next week, something that doesn't conflict with Miss Rushman's public calendar." She considered the bathroom a moment longer, then snatched her makeup travel kit and a towel. She retreated into the bedroom, shut the bathroom door firmly, and stuffed the towel into the gap along the floor, then grabbed the clothes she'd hung up on the inside of the closet and made a further retreat into the living room, closing the bedroom door behind her.

"Also, place an order to replace the bathroom toiletries and ask housekeeping to come up and clean _everything_ in the bathroom and bedroom, top to bottom, as soon as humanly possible. Add a gratuity to their next paychecks."

"Of course," JARVIS said, unruffled. "Will that be all, Miss Potts?"

Pepper realized that she hadn't remembered to grab her shoes. She stared at the door.

She had an extra pair of heels at her desk. They wouldn't technically match her dress. She decided she didn't care. A few hundred feet of barefoot walking and a mismatched outfit were a small price to pay for not venturing back into her bedroom.

"Yes, JARVIS. That will be all."


End file.
